The growing popularity of the destinations threatened by climate change is a form of last chance tourism: to see it before it disappears. This kind of tourism is supposed to increase the environmental awareness of tourists, but instead of contributing to the conservation of the visited places, they contribue to its faster destruction.

 The polar landscapes of the Arctic have attracted visitors for centuries, but today this trend is much more stronger, 7.7 million people visited just the province of Manitoba in 2008. What those tourist are attracted from is the so called “last chance” tourism, or the desire to visit a destination, before it vanishes or is irrevocably changed. According to some authors (Dawson, Lemelin 2009) this trend is part of the gaining popularity doom tourism, or the aim of people to encounter with the death.

Every year more tourist strive to visit vanishing destinations, cultures and animal species. This trend provokes the tour operators, entrepreneurs and locals to offer more possibilities for them to do that. New accommodation facilities are planned, new infrastructure is bulit in order to meet the needs of the new visitors. This big amount of tourist indeed will bring more profit for the locals, but the prompt development will increase the footprint on the environment and will inevitably quicken the vanishing.

The most common perception is that, when the tourist travel to remote destinations, which are popular with their threatened from exctinction species, beautiful well-preserved nature, they are going for eco tourism. In fact, this idea is wrong, because actually they contribute to the damage of the place, because they use long-haul air flights to reach the destination, five-star hotels to stay in there, and the big amount of money they spend rarely is used to preserve the nature.

Wheeller classify this trips as “ego tourism”, because tourist seek kind of symbol, in the case of the Arctic and polar bear viewing in Churchill – to see it, before it disappears, before others destroy it, so we can be some of the few once, who have seen it. This confirms the fact, that the idea of tourism to the Arctic being “green” is wrong.

The above-mentioned issue brings into question the role of agents of change and the “environmental ambassadors” ( Burns & Bibbins, 2009). Most of the people, visiting Churcill for polar bear viewing, admit that they are attracted to it, by the fact, that polar bears are vulnerable due to melting ice and are expected to disappear soon. A survey, conducted on-site in 2007 makes clear that most people accept that “humans are contributing to changes in the global climate”, but very few of them understand how this actually happens and that they are part of it. Therefore on-site behavior is not observed and it cannot be expected that visitors to vanishing destinations will become agents of change for those places.

Another problem in Churchill is that it does not exsist long-term perspective for tourism development. Local stakeholders do not think and plan for the future, that is way tourism in this destination cannot be considered sustainable.

In order to stop the trend, making vanishing destinations change much faster, the number of visitors should be minimised by using tools such as higher prices, more taxes, restrictions and making  environmental contribution to the destination mandatory.

The questions, that arise are if people are morally allowed to deny the access to certain destination and will the restrictions help to stop the inevitable changes.

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